From the same people who put together Nerd Block, Horror Block, Gamer Block, etc. now comes Comic Block! May 2015 is the first month for this new mystery box service and having recently gotten hooked on stuff like this and being a comic book fan, I was excited to see what the Comic Block would bring. I won’t go into details of the service (Hey, I’m not getting comped here, so why should I?) but head on over to nerdblock.com/comic if this ends up looking like your thing.

The Comic Block box as it arrived in the mail! I wonder if they’ll change the theme of the box every month. Lots of cool comic book-related stuff they could do.

Opening the box, the first thing I see is a shirt. I couldn’t remember if a t-shirt came with this Block. All I could remember to expect was some comic books but t-shirts are pretty common for this type of stuff. In fact, I think the t-shirt is usually the best thing about these mystery boxes and they usually make the subscription price or one-time fee well worth paying.

I haven’t been a Simpsons fan since the early ’90s but this exclusive Shirtpunch t-shirt of Comic Book Guy t-shirt is pretty funny.

I’m not sure what Secret Wars is about. Marvel already had Secret Wars I & II back in the ’80s and then Secret War in the last 10 years or so. Seems odd to have another event given the same name. It almost seems the same as DC’s Convergence storyline in which they are mashing together all of their universes ONCE AGAIN to make one true DC Universe. I have absolutely not clue what Mythic is. Still, I’m fairly happy with these comics because they’ll give me an idea of what’s going on currently in Marvel and DC (I usually stick to trade paperbacks and older issues thanks to Marvel’s Marvel Unlimited digital comic service).

The final piece of this month’s Comic Block is a nice “collectible art print” of Batman. It’s printed on what is basically postcard-quality paper. I don’t think I’ll be framing this as Comic Block suggests but it’s a nice add-on. I hope they come up with other comic book trinkets to give us but I would welcome future art prints as well.

There’s no magazine with this mystery box (as some of them tend to have) but they did included a nice card sheet explaining what’s inside.

A nice way to end things.

So what did I think? I think for $14 this was a good deal. Comic books aren’t cheap these days. You’re usually going to pay anywhere from $3.50 to $4.99 a book so getting three books plus a t-shirt plus another freebie item is a very good deal. I signed up for three months and I don’t regret it.

I’m slowly getting back into comics via graphic novel collections and Marvel Unlimited and Comic Blook is another good way to sample some titles and figure out what else I want to read. Thumbs up.